Kelandon

I mean, you kept going in, killing the same Foul Larvae, and then running out while those very Foul Larvae respawned. You weren't whittling them down; you were killing the same respawns over and over again. I don't know what you thought was going to happen. Also, while people generally hated the Strange Cave, their hate was largely due to the plot (which, I admit, I could've explained better) and the awful color of the outside (which, I admit, is awful). I never got reports of people having the kinds of issues with the combats that you're having. Ultimately, I think your tactics (and your build, which is far from optimal) are reaching their upper limits here; you need to make better choices or else you won't be able to get through.

I remember you asking out loud in an earlier episode, "Why am I getting so many items with poison and acid resistance?" This is why. But I guess you sold most of them. It struck me that you could have used the Cloudkill exploit near the end of this episode and wiped out all but one of the monsters you were facing. (It also would've killed most of your Grizzlies, but so what? You would've won.) All you had to do was back up your mage about two steps, use an Energy Elixir, and fire away. Of course, that was right before an acid strike, so each of those dead monsters would've had a one-in-four chance of respawning anyway, but that probably would've brought back only one or two of the five you would've killed. It also struck me that I probably set up the respawns in an inadvisable manner. Most of the monsters on the east side respawn. Most of the monsters on the west side don't. But the east side leads to a combat upstairs, and the west side doesn't. In the rebalance, I think I would reverse that: the west side should respawn and the east side should not.

I just tested every link in the OP and every GF5 link in the board header, as well as RainbowDashRadical's link a few posts ago, and every one of them worked for me. So if there's a dead link, I can't find it.

Totally separately, I caught a bunch of other things (and other things were reported to me), so I have a new version of Exodus, downloadable here. It's mostly tested at this point, so I encourage anyone to update. I did change the behavior of Status Nearby again. What I did before was just intended to restore original behavior, but this is now intended to respond to the concerns about the lack of transparency. It should now be very obvious what a Status Nearby-using monster is doing at any given moment, and the problems that Chessrook44 encountered when running away out of combat mode won't happen anymore.

"Slimes don't have eyes!" Lol! You appear to have gotten the point! "I hope it's not more of those frustrating slimes!" Lol again! Never fear, it is not! But I don't think what is there is any more to your liking. I suppose we are now approaching my rather pointed references to Valley of the Dying Things. Fun stuff. And I guess Machrone doesn't change his report into the Orb during the Strange Cave chapter, but he did during the Lava Ocean chapter and will in the Peninsula Camp chapter. And even though you can ask the same questions of most characters, many times the answers will be different — at least some of Pithoss's responses change after each quest in the Strange Cave, for example. (Oh, and Ethass's secrets! Ah, the foreshadowing!)

That was how it worked in Avernum 1 and Avernum 2, but not in BoA (and not in Avernum 3, if I remember correctly). You can see it in the most recent episode; the monsters still hit even though a PC has Sanctuary. EDIT: Although, as ChowGuy clarified by email, there's a chance of attacks failing, both melee and otherwise. It's just not 100%.

Actually, as far as I can tell, monsters can still target regular attacks at characters with Sanctuary. They just don't target them if there's someone else without Sanctuary that they could target. Yes, this means that the description in the BoA Manual ("Other characters can't attack or target with spells") is misleading at best. Sanctuary is primarily useful for hiding individual characters that you don't want attacked, not for hiding the entire party, unfortunately. So, in relation to some of the complaints in the most recent episode, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is default BoA behavior. I suppose it would be possible to modify the default creature script to change this, but I never did.

Watching these episodes is weird because apparently I remember the beta version of Exodus much better than the release version. The Slime Pit is supposed to have three levels. I apparently cut out the second level during beta, but I don't remember doing that and I don't remember why. (I think maybe people complained that the Slime Pit was too long?) Well, that dungeon will get added back in — in somewhat modified form, probably as a side dungeon — if I ever release the rebalance/expansion. Just wait until the Peninsula Camp chapter (the next chapter after the Strange Cave chapter), when your enemies cast those spells on you! Good times. As I recall, it wasn't just a personal preference; there was actually one fight where it was crucial that you have something that could hit monsters that had the Invulnerability status. That's in the last chapter, though.... Web attack is a pretty standard thing in BoA. In Exodus, you can do the same thing to them; that's what Bind Foe does. Insects and certain rare monsters ("Special" type) are immune to webs, but other than that, two or three castings of Bind Foe will immobilize anything for a good long while. I used that a fair bit as I was going through the Slime Pit and Fekhthen.

Ordinarily, Invulnerability blocks even unblockable damage. But I thought that was annoying, so Cloudkill actually strips Invulnerability, does unblockable damage, and then restores Invulnerability. So do the other spells that do unblockable damage (Destruction, Death Knell). Also, if you check your statuses, you were still Blessed almost the whole time you were fighting the monsters with the curse fields — the curse field wasn't very strong. Misses were largely due to the extraordinarily high level of the monsters you were fighting (a lot of these slimes are about level 90), not due to the field.

It depends on the scenario. I don't recall the exact formula off the top of my head, but monsters are given different summoning classes, and higher levels of Arcane Summon summon higher summoning classes. But those classes can be changed in each scenario, so you won't get the same results in every scenario. Probably the most salient characteristic is creature level, which you can check in corescendata or the scenario editor.

Yes, it's got that now. For some reason, I hadn't fixed that in my personal version that I uploaded earlier, so I uploaded a new version now — so if you snapped up the one a few hours ago, you'll need to re-download. The missing Sanctuary L3 is not included in this, though. That will have to wait until the next version, in which (if it ever happens) I will put the deleted dungeon containing Sanctuary L3 back in the scenario.

Yes, use the gmail. Aha, yes. I found the one in the Lava Ocean, and there were a couple in the last chapter also. The Armor of Wisdom does appear to have an encumbrance of 1. That's probably unintentional. Given everything that I now have fixed on my personal copy, I'm releasing a full-fledged update, downloadable here. Everything here was a very minor change, along the lines of making some skill checks look for Nature Lore instead of Luck, but this version is potentially unstable because I have not tested every single change, so you should take this as a beta release for the moment. I will be checking for bugs at some point in the next couple of days and, unless I find something, this will be a final release as of the end of the day Friday this week. I should note that this release is not the rebalance-and-expansion update that I've had in the back of my head for a couple years, but a few of you get to be made famous in a readme, so it's still exciting!

That's the same bug as before. For some reason, on Windows BoA, the call that's supposed to make it so that casting special spells uses up action points doesn't work (in this context). It works just fine on Mac BoA. Given that it's the call that doesn't work, I don't know how I would fix the bug even if I wanted to. It's going to screw up The Magic even more than it screws up Exodus — but most of the combat in The Magic wasn't intended to be all that hard anyway, so no big deal.

The scripts are the same on a Mac and a PC... they're text files. But it looks like the version that downloads from my site has a different scenario script than the one sitting on my computer. That's weird. Here's the fix. Dude, help me out. What other bugs did you find? If you don't report them, I don't know about them and can't fix them.

Apparently you found a bug in Capture Soul? But it's not one that I can reproduce, nor one that I can find the cause of by reading the scripts. I am at a loss as to what happened there. That's unfortunate, because I used Capture Soul a lot in the Slime Pit.

You went back to Velthkhogroz's cave, used Far Sight, found a secret passage in the northwest... and then didn't go into that secret passage! So much for that level of Destruction. Oh well. And yeah, everybody hates the color of the Strange Cave. In fact, everybody pretty much hates everything about the Strange Cave. It was by far the least popular of the chapters. I think it's important, though; it's doing a lot of work to set up what follows in the Peninsula Camp. By the way, people sometimes have one or two different things to say to you when you come back after finishing a quest. Machrone says something different into his orb after each quest, for example. So you may want to go around and talk to everyone quickly after each quest. Oh, and one other thing. This is probably not at all clear now, but the whole Machrone = Richard White thing was an in-joke back in 2006. Spiderweb used to publish a few games not made by Jeff, including several made by a guy named Richard White. The games were mostly pretty terrible (with maybe one exception), so they became a running joke throughout the community. And Spiderweb of 2006 being Spiderweb of 2006, the running joke expanded incomprehensibly. Mostly the Machrone = Richard White thing was for laughs. The reveal on Phaedra's pregnancy is supposed to be superficially funny (although, at a deeper level, the whole scene should be intensely troubling), and bringing Richard White into it brings the tone down even more. But even so, this fact is not nothing; Machrone = Richard White comes back (in a way) in The Magic.

I think I must have deliberately nerfed the second Dalaghant fight, which I did presumably because it follows the Breeding Pit and people are likely to feel more or less how you did when you got there (exhausted). Dalaghant's script doesn't use a typical version of Status Nearby; it uses a version that allows for resisting the status, which you mostly did because you had such an extraordinarily high resistance to mental effects by that point. That's interesting (I had forgotten that I did that), and it also seems about right. The Berekh Hive is supposed to be exhausting but not necessarily all that hard. Because the frame of mind you're supposed to have walking into the final Lava Ocean cut scene is, "Oh my god, I'm exhausted, I've been fighting demons and berekhs in this hive of disgusting filth and obscenity for so long I can hardly stand, and now I'm heading back to camp for some rest -- um, what is happening here?"

I'm reminded of a line out of the thank-yous to the beta testers in the readme: "Nikki, who wanted the Berekh Hive suitable for a family show." I don't think I ever got Arcane Summon high enough to get the Grizzlies. I guess at that level Arcane Summon doesn't suck. Also, holy moly, Lethal Blow is powerful. Might not be a bad idea to train to get that skill to higher levels. LOL at not saving! Oops! Looking forward to the next couple of episodes! The second Dalaghant fight is a fun one, and the cut scene upon the return to the Lava Ocean Camp is my favorite juxtaposition of separate plots (Berekh Hive and Phaedra's pregnancy) in probably all of my scenarios.

IMPORTANT NOTE: You're probably coming close to a part of the Peninsula Camp sequence that regularly has an Unhandled Exception for Windows users. If you hit what appears to be a terminal bug at a fairly dramatic juncture in a camp on a mountain, I think I know why and can pass along a patch if you post the problem here. (Or email me at tomwatts5 (at) gmail (dot) com.) It doesn't appear to be completely consistent, though, so you may not have any problems. OTHER RANDOM THOUGHTS: There are some moments when I actually laugh out loud, and "I don't know how long" the sequence in the next cave is going to be at the end of this episode was one of them. That's the Berekh Hive, so, you know, very long! Looking forward to it! I did finally run that test on Slow, and yes, magic immunity not only gives a chance to resist Slow altogether but also reduces the amount of Slow rendered. But I wasn't able to determine a simple formula for how those relate. It wasn't exactly consistent, which makes me think that it's probabilistic (i.e., uses dice). Also, the chance to resist doesn't seem to be straightforward either. I gave one creature 60% magic immunity, but it didn't resist even once (out of about six or seven tries), but the Demon Warriors in Exodus have 50% magic immunity and were resisting about half the time. And I wasn't able to figure out under what circumstances the Slow status takes effect, either; some high-level monsters seem unaffected by low levels of Slow, but it wasn't obvious when and why. But this suggests to me that casting Slow on high-level magic-resistant monsters has limited effect, unless you can cast it three or four times. (In contrast, casting Slow three or four times on non-magic resistant monsters does little more than casting Slow once or twice.) Interesting. I don't think I ever knew this before.

Three things struck me during that demon fight in the southeast: 1) That fight is not intended to be especially hard. You're just not using any special spells. Toss out a couple Bind Foe spells to web a few demons in place, hit them with a bunch of Bonechill spells to do huge amounts of damage, and they pretty much die immediately. For your sake, I hope you figure out special spells pretty soon in these episodes. 2) You're using Draco as a melee fighter, but you're not blessing him the way do with your other melee fighters. Why not? It seems weird. 3) It sort of looked like partial magic resistance has two effects on Slow: the spell may be resisted entirely (which shows up in the text box) and the spell renders a lower level of the status (which does not). I'm going to run some experiments tonight to see if that's so; I don't think I've ever noticed that before. Totally separately, you keep saying that the note said not to trust Vylas. That's wrong. The note said not to trust the silver-tongued demon (i.e., Dalaghant). Vylas is looooong dead.

I'm aware that you have your reasons. But, even being consistent with your earlier episodes, you don't have to read it in the Slavic accent; anything "older than the Khalthanad" is a thousand years older than the vahnatai you've voiced before, and accents change over time. And I think that reading more or less baroque English in a vaguely Slavic accent sounds awful here. Eh, that probably would've been helpful. I don't think it's "required" (as you put it), though; after all, once you started paying attention to statuses, you figured it out within a reload or two! That's exactly what's supposed to happen. (EDIT: But see below.) As you probably have figured out by now — especially after the Dalaghant fight following the Berekh Hive — this script, Status Nearby, shows up again. Be on the lookout later in the scenario (especially in the Peninsula Camp sequence). Also, most of your combat issues throughout Bahssikava and Exodus would be reduced if you weren't overly dependent on melee. You really should experiment with the special spells more. Toss a couple Bind Foe spells on the haakai, and poof; he's webbed and can't do anything. And maybe have one or two characters use archery, since Silthokh sells arrows now. Finally, you mention not having found many energy potions in dungeons, which is true, but Silthokh sells a ton of energy potions. Buy as many as you need from him. EDIT: Because I was curious, I dug in the Status Nearby code, and holy hell, there is a bug, apparently caused by a BoA update after I released Exodus. Here's a patch. Download the file and put it into the Exodus folder, replacing the old file. That should restore the original behavior before the BoA update broke it. It's a good idea to update because, as I mentioned, there are several more monsters using Status Nearby that appear later in the game, past even where you probably are now. Gory details in the spoiler tags.

You wondered about Bonnie surviving multiple blows after she was down to zero health. You did give her an item that adds a bunch to the chance of saving life, and if I remember correctly, she's the only one of your characters with a substantial amount of Luck. Between the two of those, Bonnie will have a decent chance of surviving a killing blow. (At the moment, nobody else does, but you could boost that by increasing Luck, which I strongly recommend.) You also wondered what happens if you try to join with Dalaghant. There is actually an option to do that, but it ends the scenario prematurely (and gets really dark really quickly). I mean the stuff that's translated from Archaic Slith (anything "older than the Khalthanad," e.g., Elin-Tel's note), which you're doing in your Slavic accent. It sounds atrocious, IMO. The writing simply doesn't match the accent. It does appear that you went for my misdirection on Phaedra's baby! I'm enjoying that a great deal. Can't wait until the end of this chapter. In what way? You knew it was going to be a hard fight. You repeatedly used Arcane Summon, even though you know it doesn't work very well. You often fought enemy summons, despite knowing that that's ineffective. (Casting spells that primarily hurt the enemy summons, not the main enemies, counts as fighting the enemy summons.) You didn't use any of your special spells or consumables (except, toward the end, a Heroic Brew), despite knowing that they are effective. You didn't pay attention to status effects, even though status effects were what killed you in at least three of your reloads of the fight — which delayed your figuring out that everyone who gets close to the haakai gets paralyzed. It seems to me like you were the one who dropped the ball here. The "everyone is paralyzed so you can't do anything" thing is default BoA behavior, by the way. That's not my scripting; that's just what BoA does.

Regarding the multiple slows: I just ran some tests, and apparently if you have a low enough level of slow combined with a high enough level of monster, the slowing doesn't really take effect. The slow succeeds, but the monster doesn't lose turns. (This is an undocumented feature, as far as I can tell.) I don't think I ever noticed this before, because I think I always had a much higher level of slow than you do. (This is probably poor design on my part — the HLPM sells a much, much higher level of slow at a comparable party level than do the merchants in Exodus.) Regardless, my comment was spurred on by your casting slow three times, not twice, and I'm pretty sure that — even given what you're observing — there is no difference between two slows and three, except in how long the slow lasts (and none of these fights so far have been long enough for that to matter). Also, blech, giving the archaic language a Slavic(-ish) accent sounds horrible. An old-timey English accent would make sense, but wtf with the Dracula voice. (I also can't stand the Machrone voice, but that's a separate issue.)

Tensions simmering! Love it! And it only gets more tense from here! You won't get Death Knell for a while, but yes, it targets only hostile NPCs.

In relation to your most recent commentary: I'm glad you like Exodus better, although it's worth noting that that was not the impression of the community at the time; Bahssikava took first place in the first BoA scenario design contest, and Exodus took last place in the second BoA scenario design contest. (This probably had something to do with the fact that Jeff judged the first contest and the community judged the second, but even so.) But I actually prefer the more challenging combat of Bahssikava. I'm mostly fast-forwarding through your fights with the lava lizards because they're just not terribly interesting. There are a lot of things that I would do differently if I rebalanced the scenarios now, but making the combat easy throughout (which is what you apparently would prefer) is not one of them. That is, Exodus is not the way that it is because I thought that the way that Bahssikava was designed was a mistake; it's the way that it is because it's intended to be a different scenario. Lord Putidus (which came between Bahssikava and Exodus) also featured very difficult combat. This was just the way some of my scenarios were intended to be. Put another way, Exodus was not a reaction against Bahssikava; Exodus was a reaction against the TM scenarios of the time (Canopy, Mad Ambition, Emerald Mountain). Also, you're missing out on a lot of extras at this point. You missed a level of Destruction (and a number of custom items) in Velthkhogroz's cave, for example. Looking for more secret passages and exploring a bit more thoroughly would be beneficial. None of these things are necessary to complete the game, but they will make upcoming fights easier.